Last weekend, Congress passed a trillion-dollar budget bill. Among its provisions, plenty of things not related to spending. One of these so-called riders is aimed at saving the hundred-watt incandescent light bulb. But as NPR’s Peter Overby tells us, the move by Republicans is more about politics than light bulbs.

Here is Overby:

Old-fashioned incandescent bulbs waste a lot of energy. So under federal law, they’re being slowly phased out. And the first to go, starting on New Year’s Day, is that old reliable of home lighting: the 100-watt bulb. But what looked like energy efficiency when President George W. Bush signed to law four years ago now looks like oppressive big government to many conservatives.

So the conservatives made sure that the spending bill had a rider which says the Energy Department cannot spend money to enforce the phase out of the 100-watt bulb. Here is where things get interesting. Overby went and talked to industry representatives and found that few if any actually wanted to repeal the ban:

But from the perspective of the lighting industry, this rider is several years too late to make a difference, and they don’t want Congress changing things now….

companies long ago started changing their product lines from traditional incandescents to halogens, compact fluorescents and LEDs.

So far, so interesting. The companies being regulated actually want the regulation and getting rid of it would create uncertainty. So, “the move by Republicans is more about politics than light bulbs.”

But is this really the whole story? I think it would be natural to ask just a few more questions. If the ban were lifted, nothing would keep the companies from making the newfangled bulbs anyway, right? So why in the world would a firm favor legislation that limits its options? Why would it expend scarce resources lobbying Congress to keep the ban? Overby says that they “spent months giving show-and-tell demonstrations to lawmakers.” That must have taken up a fair amount of company time. But why do it?

My guess is that it has less to do with the firms wanting to limit their own options and more to do with them wanting to limit the options of would-be competitors who haven’t made investments in the newer technologies. They must worry that there is still a market for the older bulbs and they’d prefer that other firms be forbidden from serving that market.

Much relatively recent research has argued that regulation was often sought by industries for their own protection, rather than being imposed in some ‘public interest.’ Although the distinction is not always made clear in this recent literature, we may add that regulation which is not directly sought at the outset is generally ‘captured’ later on so it behaves with consistency to the industry’s major interests, or at least has been observed to behave in this manner.

When I used to teach capture theory to my students, I’d often encounter incredulity. It sounds like formalized conspiracy theory. Are we
really supposed to believe that all regulations come about because industries have somehow greased the palms of politicians? Well, no. Sometimes it’s that obvious. But often, it is subtler.

As the light bulb story illustrates, some regulations come about because some politician has some well-meaning belief that the regulation will improve lives. But once the regulation is on the books, it tends to favor incumbent firms. So even if it proves to be inefficient, the incumbent firms are willing to exert a great deal of pressure to keep it there lest the market be opened up to others with different business models.

For a helpful and enlightening compendium of observations about capture, see this post by my colleague, Adam Thierer. It is interesting to note that progressive thinkers have often been the first to uncover these stories.